A few weeks ago, I shared with you my idea for a calendar gift that did not involve hand prints. I thought I would share with you the finished product pages from one of my students. We made a few changes from my previous post. I have to say that even though there is no paint mess with these pages, it STILL takes a long time to create. I would suggest starting it MUCH earlier than I did. We did one page a day for 3 weeks and that was a bit crazy. I think next year, I will start it earlier and only do a couple months a week.

I LOVE using Kindness elves in my classroom! This year, I changed it just a little. Instead of moving the elves around each day, I took photos of the elves in various places in my classroom.

Then I imported the photos onto notes that were left in the place where the photos were taken. The elves left a note on the first day telling the kids that they were in the classroom, but they could not see them until they started seeing KINDNESS in the classroom. Here is the first note:

Here are a few examples of the notes they left:

On the day before they left, they showed themselves to the kids congratulating them on all the random acts of kindness that they saw occurring in the classroom. On the LAST day, they left the kids a few classroom gifts; one of them being this classroom book about paying it forward...

We made these Christmas tree math ornament trees. The kids colored the ornaments with red and yellow oil crayons and then used green water paint for the tree. They added construction paper gifts and did the math story problem. Easy peasey! You can click the photo below for the words and Christmas tree.

I have been doing gingerbread house making with my class for over 20 years and with my family for that long or longer!

But even after doing them for that long, we still have building malfunctions. This little guy's roof caved in and it needed some repair work!

So, that's it for now, my friends.... I will be taking a short break from blogging, Facebook, and all things school for awhile. I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!